A Private Sorcery (37 page)

When she wakes, Carlos is staring up at the ceiling. He's wiggling his fingers and toes, looking, it seems, at a wavering band of dark, a shadow from the blinds. Scooping him up, she heads over to Sonia and Hank's room.

Sonia opens the door, the freckled top of one breast visible at the neckline of her canary yellow robe. “You're an angel.”

“All I did was lay him on the bed and take a nap. When I woke up, he was watching the shadows on the ceiling.”

“You're kidding! He didn't scream?”

“Not a peep. I'm going out for a couple of hours, but I'll take him as soon as I get back.”

P
RANKLE'S TOUR IS
heavily weighted toward churches. He begins with the Catedral Metropolitana, one of the oldest buildings in Guatemala City, spared from earthquakes—according to local lore—by a deal the Holy Virgin Mary, patron saint of the city, made with Santa Teresa. Next they visit La Merced, where Prankle points out the unusual organ and the colonial altar moved from a church in Antigua. Back in the car, they head up a small hill to La Ermita del Carmen. He has a smoke in the garden while Rena goes inside.

From a back pew, she studies the gold-and-mahogany altar. Shortly after they got married, Saul had gone through a cathedral phase, wanting her to accompany him as he visited every cathedral within a few hours drive of the city. He toyed with writing an article on the cathedral as an expression of man's narcissism, not the contemporary narcissism of self-absorption but the narcissism of grandiosity—a noble narcissism, Saul claimed. At the time, she had attributed this obsession to Saul's disappointment with his work, the way he felt himself to be a
cog in what he called the psychosis gin: the circuit whereby families turn over their psychotics to the state, which then pays the pharmaceutical companies to wipe out their hallucinations like so many roaches nested in a wall. Now, though, she wonders if there'd been something more at stake, a questioning on Saul's part about the limitations of his and Leonard's (and, she supposes, despite her mother's vestigial Catholicism, her, too) ingrained secularism.

The last church on Prankle's tour is the Capilla de Yurrita, a Russian Orthodox structure built at the turn of the century by a rich religious fanatic. Prankle leaves the car running while Rena walks around the exterior of twisted pillars and onion domes, all proportioned so they look more like caricatures of themselves than themselves. Heading south, they pass the Terminal Market, where contraband monkeys and parrots are sold. Prankle ends the tour with a spin through the Aurora park, a misnomer, he tells her, since it houses an airport, a military base and a sad zoo.

“The only thing we missed is Kaminal Juyu, the Mayan burial ruins west of here, but there's nothing to see from the outside and you're not going to catch me dead, pardon the pun, crawling around in those tunnels.” He looks at his watch. “How's a beer and a steak in an air-conditioned room sound? I know a place where the meat's more or less maggot-free.”

T
HE STEAK HOUSE
, it turns out, is in the posh section of Zona Diez, not far from the American embassy. It's softly lit and very cool. The bartender waves at Prankle. Two bottles of beer appear.

A waiter in a pressed white shirt approaches with menus. Prankle holds up a hand. He speaks in rapid Spanish. The waiter nods and does an about-face.

“I nixed the salads. The lettuce is an invitation for the runs.”

Rolled
rellenos
arrive and Prankle opens them to spread hot sauce inside. Hot chilies burst inside Rena's mouth and her eyes tear. She rinses her mouth with beer.

“Sorry. I forget that other people's taste buds haven't been destroyed
like mine.” When the steaks are brought sizzling on metal platters, he reaches over to cut hers down the middle. “
Bueno
,” he says to the waiter. “You don't want them rare here. Save that for Peter Luger's.”

Prankle polishes off half his steak in two minutes' time and orders more beers. He lights a cigarette and angles his body so the smoke blows away from her. “So, we journalists are all part detective. I thought maybe if I got two beers in you, you'd tell me why you're here.”

Her stomach clutches as she sees that she's underestimated Prankle, assuming that he would, like Sonia, be content to have her serve as his audience. “What do you mean?”

“No one comes to Guatemala to stay in the capital. The old guy.”

She scurries to construct an answer, then stops herself. This is irrational, she tells herself; her claim to Bernardo's remains has been sanctioned by two governments.

To her surprise, Prankle knows all about Bernardo. “The story broke the first time I lived here, 1976 to 1977. I wrote maybe half a dozen pieces about it for the
San Francisco Chronicle
. The wire services picked up a couple of them. It was right before the Carter administration halted support for the Guatemalan government. It was all a sham because once official support was withdrawn, the CIA simply had freer reign to do their dirty business.”

“Did you meet the father?”

“A couple of times. They were here for a few months. Staying in an apartment in Zona Cuatro. I remember him telling me that Castro had been his student—and a lousy one at that. The mother was a reddiaper baby. A pianist, I think.”

“Opera singer.”

Prankle laughs. “Not too subtle, I'd say. Finding the body right after the father kicks the bucket. They must have assumed there was no one else who still gave a damn. Probably no one except the father had said boo about the corpse in ten years. So they figure once he's gone, they can close out the case, clear the shelf space.”

“Who's they?”

“Bingo, babe. That's the million-dollar question around here. You answer that one and you'll get the Pulitzer. Don't worry. I'm not going to scoop you. Not because I'm chivalrous, but I couldn't sell it. A body in formaldehyde doesn't make good copy. You need fresh blood.”

W
ITH
C
ARLOS AS A
reason for making it an early night, Rena declines Prankle's suggestion that they move on for drinks at one of the expat bars.

“Well, baby-sitting's a nobler cause than baiting the spooks, which is what I'll end up doing with my pals at El Establo. The bartender there makes sport out of tripping them up on their covers. But if you want to understand the adoption thing and see what this city is really about, you should come with me tomorrow to El Hoyo.” El Hoyo, Prankle explains, means
the hole
: the place where the street children—beggars, prostitutes, addicts—live. “The reporting's done, and I've got a photographer lined up to do the shoot late in the day when the light's best.”

Prankle pulls in front of La Posada de las Madres. Rena hops out before he can reach for her. “Five. Here in front.”

She nods, unsure whether she's assenting out of hope that there's more she can learn about what happened to Bernardo or out of fear of insulting Prankle. She knocks on Sonia and Hank's door. Hank lets her in. Sonia is sitting on the bed, giving Carlos a bottle. Her hair looks wild. Carlos grips the sides of the bottle, eyes closed, as he gulps the milk.

Sonia hands the baby to Hank so she can show Rena the bottles she has left prepared in the kitchen. She yanks on the door of the rusted refrigerator, points to a plastic bin labeled with her room number. “I mixed three bottles. He'll probably need one around two and then at six and ten. There's a pot on the stove. I just boil the water and set the bottle in the pot for a minute or two to take off the chill. If you have any problems, knock. We'll be there.”

“Don't worry. It's like riding a bike. It's all coming back.”

“Are you sure you don't mind?” Sonia has begun to cry. She wipes
her nose on the sleeve of her robe. “I'm just so tired,” she whispers. “I'm scared I'll go out of my mind and do something awful.”

Back in her room, Rena bathes the baby. Holding Carlos over the sink, she sponges him with warm water, first his face, then inside the folds in his neck, then his chest, back, bottom, legs and feet. Spreading a towel on Leonard's bed, she dries and diapers him, letting him lie and kick while she changes into her own nightclothes.

When she sees Carlos yawn, she cradles him in her arms and walks in small circles, singing softly to him until his breathing grows slow and deep. She sets him on the inside of her bed against the wall and curls around him.

Sleep
, she instructs herself.
You'll have to be up in a couple of hours
. But she cannot stop thinking about Bernardo. About Prankle's implication that his body has been stashed in a basement these past fourteen years. That there was an American official somewhere who'd given that the nod. It makes her objections to the work at Muskowitz & Kerrigan seem trivial. Like complaining that radioactive apples are hard to digest.

A
T FIVE
, P
RANKLE IS WAITING
. He introduces the photographer, Jean, who is rifling through a camera bag next to him on the backseat of the Morris Minor. Jean glances up just long enough to avoid seeming rude.

They park behind the bus terminal and walk a few blocks south to what looks like an abandoned construction lot. Everywhere there are children, running, banging, stretched out asleep.

“Rubble never cleared after the earthquake,” Prankle says. The stench is terrible, and Rena has to refrain from covering her nose. Prankle drizzles Tootsie Rolls into the hands of the children, who flock around them. Jean moves quickly, giving out more candy in exchange for the children letting him photograph them. The older children follow him, watching as he switches back and forth between the three cameras dangling from his neck. The younger children stay crouched in the dirt, digging with their hands through the rubble. A boy who
looks like he can't be more than four years old is bare-bottomed. His stomach sticks out from under his T-shirt, hard like a filled balloon.

“Parasites,” Prankle says. “They run around butt-naked over garbage and the worms climb right in.”

Rena stays at the edge of the rubble while Prankle makes his way over boards and cinder blocks to catch up with Jean. Together they head toward the shanties in back. Corrugated boxes, sheets of tin, a discarded curtain. A pickup truck stops, and an Indian man dressed in western clothes goes inside one of the shanties. A few minutes later, he returns with two children. A boy and a girl. The man touches their backs with the flat of his hand as they climb into the truck.

After the pickup pulls away, Rena unclasps her bag and takes out a clump of bills. She walks over to a group of children and hands them each a bill: five, ten and twenty quetzals. The older ones glance back at the shanties before burying the bills in their clothing. The younger ones stare at them longingly, as though they might be food itself.

Nowhere an adult to be seen. Like a children's playground in hell.

Prankle approaches. Glass breaks under his boots. Backlit by shards of light darting off the tin roofs of the shanties, he appears preternaturally large. The children touch the tape deck he holds in his hand. He talks to them in Spanish and then plays back the conversation. They listen in silence, not one of them giggling at the sound of their own voice.

“Let's go. I've shown Jean what to shoot. He'll be here another hour or so.”

In the car, Prankle cups her knee. “It's stupid to give them money. The big ones shake down the little ones. They take whatever money they find and use it for glue.”

“They sniff glue?”

“Cheapest way to get high. It's a dog-eat-dog world. The bigger kids, nine, ten, eleven, work for pimps, mostly around the bus station and the Central Market. A night's work gets them two containers of glue and a couple of sandwiches. They control the younger ones, who beg outside the hotels. There's no fooling around. If the older kids don't turn over every quetzal, they can end up stuffed in a garbage can. The
younger ones get thrown out of El Hoyo, which, hideous as it seems, is still their home.”

Prankle starts the car and slowly backs away from the bus terminal.

“Where do they come from?”

“All over. The Guatemalans treasure children. Most adults spend their whole lives trying to provide for their children. But there's a war going on. Here, in the city, you can easily forget that. Out in the countryside, everyone feels it. A little girl I talked to last week told me that she hid under a crate while uniformed men set her house on fire with her parents and two older brothers bound inside. Afterwards, she just started walking and eventually ended up here. Another girl said she'd run away from the
finca
on the coast where her family had gone to work because she was being beaten with a horse crop by the foreman for not picking bananas fast enough.”

Prankle glances at Rena. “You could use a drink. The Sheraton's around the corner. An Ugly American scene, but the bartender keeps a stash of good tequila.”

R
ENA SURVEYS THE
familiar atrium: the tight-seated chairs, the potted philodendron, the electronic pings of doors opening, elevators arriving, registers ringing. A woman standing in the doorway of one of the boutiques waves a bottle of Worth perfume. Her bracelets flash. “
Cuanto cuesta esto
?” she asks. The salesclerk behind the counter looks up from her magazine. “Eighty,” she says in English.

Inside the bar, disco music plays over the sound system and the walls are decorated with American movie posters. Prankle leads her to a banquette beneath a
Casablanca
poster: Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart on an airplane runway. A cocktail waitress brings a bowl of tomato-flecked guacamole surrounded by tortilla chips. Prankle presses a five into her hand. “
Para Renaldo. Dos margaritas. Dile que es para Prankle.
”

When the drinks arrive, Prankle clinks Rena's glass with his own. “To Bernardo Santiago. Whatever happened to him, may he rest in peace.”